Institute for the Study of Gender Law and Policy

Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship

Friday and Saturday November 3-4, 2006

Keynote Address

Friday 9:30am-10:45am

Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor, Emory University School of Law, "Equality: Still Illusive After All These Years?"

I. Constitutional Citizenship and Gender

Friday 11:00am-12:30pm

This panel will address constitutions as a source of equal citizenship. What role do constitutions play in declaring and fostering formal and substantive equality? Some scholars identify a "gender gap" in contemporary comparative constitutional analysis - an inattention to matters of women's rights and the role of constitutions in fostering them. Training attention on gender invites a focus on such question as: What are the limits of constitutionalism as a means of securing gender equality? What explains the gap between constitutional norms of equality and continuing social practices of inequality in the family and other parts of civil society? When rights to sex equality conflict with other constitutional rights to religious freedom and to cultural life, how do or should legislatures and courts resolve such conflicts? In countries with newer constitutions, in which women's participation in the constitution-making process has shaped the equality norms embedded in constitutions, what have the consequences of constitutionalism been for women's equality?

Lunch

Friday 12:30pm-2pm

Speaker: Regina Austin, University of Pennsylvania Law School "Visualizing Women's Citizenship at the Borders" (media presentation)

II. Democratic Citizenship and Gender

Friday 2:00pm-3:45pm

This panel will address democratic, or political, self-government and gender. It will consider gains made in fostering women's active participation in political deliberation and self-government as well as lingering obstacles to such self-government. What are the preconditions for such participation? What institutional forms encourage self-government? Have gender-specific measures aimed at increasing women's political participation, such as quotas, been effective? How do rates of voting and political representation in countries employing such measures compare with those in countries that do not? How do forms of disability bear on democratic citizenship? And how might a feminist conception of the state's obligation to warrant individual safety and foster basic liberties, including liberty of exit, help to realize democratic citizenship? Women are diverse and do not speak with one voice about the extent to which gender equality is a proper political goal and, if so, in what spheres of society to foster it. The panel will also examine competing visions of women's needs and interests and how these shape women's political participation.

III. Cultural Citizenship and Gender

Friday 4:00am-5:30pm

The idea of cultural citizenship connotes enjoying and actively shaping cultural life, including participating in the interpretation and transmission of culture. In recent years, some feminist work has posited an often sharp tension between women's equality and the preservation of cultural and religious traditions. At the same time, other feminists resist framing the issue as women's rights versus culture or women's rights versus religion. They urge attention to cultural and religious resources supporting women's equality and speak of women's rights within culture and religion. Culture, far from static, is continually subject to internal contestation and revision. When governmental authorities must interpret and adjudicate cultural and religious issues, are there accounts of culture and religion that facilitate dissent and protect against endorsing the most patriarchal accounts? How, for example, have Muslim women engaged Islamic law and feminism in their quests for equal rights? How have systems with constitutional commitments to gender equality and to cultural rights reconciled or harmonized these commitments? And what stance should government take when individuals within a protected minority group face discrimination from their community?

IV. Sexual and Reproductive Citizenship and Gender

Saturday 9:15am-11:15am

This panel will take up questions about how sexuality and reproduction bear on women's citizenship. Rhetoric about the vital link between strong families and a strong nation implies a powerful governmental interest in how citizens form and maintain families. Debates over marriage (particularly, same-sex marriage) and sex education have brought to the fore the more general question of government's interest in regulating sexuality and reproduction and the social institution of the family. How do such debates implicate women's equal citizenship? How does cultural ambivalence about gender equality bear on these debates? Is social cooperation between women and men on terms of equality possible in the domain of sexuality, family, and reproduction? Have feminist theorists offered adequate accounts of sexual and reproductive citizenship? Is it necessary (as Janet Halley argues) to "take a break from feminism" to do so, or is feminist theory one of a multiplicity of critical theories that can contribute to an apt account of sexuality, power, and citizenship? How should notions of equal citizenship shape the ongoing debate over assisted reproductive technology? How do issues of racial inequality and economic inequality work in tandem with gender equality to shape sexual relations and reproduction in contemporary societies? How might visions of women's equal citizenship address these intersecting problems of inequality?

V. Social Citizenship and Gender

Saturday 11:30am-1pm

This panel explores the link between social citizenship, or economic citizenship, and women's equal citizenship. The term "social citizenship" connotes those social rights to the material preconditions for effectively participating in society (for example, the economic security to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt included in a "Second Bill of Rights"). How does a focus on gender inform understandings of social citizenship? Accounts of social citizenship have often focused on paid work as the avenue to citizenship, leaving out the contribution to citizenship made by the family work of women. Contemporary feminist accounts attempt to speak both of men's and women's right to economic security and to decent work and of a principle of governmental responsibility to support the important work of social reproduction undertaken when families care for children and other dependents. Is it possible to advocate social citizenship in a way that does not reinforce gender role stereotypes and gender inequality at home and at work? For example, would it better secure gender and economic equity to shift away from using marital status to structure access to governmental support for workers and families to a non-marriage based system of allocation? And how should appeals to women's social citizenship reckon with women's role as paid domestic worker and how patterns of global migration affect transnational domestic workers and their families?

VI. Global Citizenship and Gender

Saturday 2:15pm-4:00pm

This panel explores the increasing relevance of global citizenship to women's equal citizenship. One aspect of such citizenship is the rights and responsibilities and norms of equality embodied in international human rights treaties and international law. "Gender mainstreaming" is increasing, and is increasingly controversial. The panel will also examine how nongovernmental organizations devoted to securing women's equality have formed alliances across national boundaries. Where, this panel will ask, do immigrants fit into appeals to equal citizenship? How have patterns of economic globalization as well as problems of war and displacement shaped women's migration across borders?